Chan Lowe: Marco Rubio and the water bottle grab

Marco Rubio and the water bottle grab

February 13, 2013|By Chan Lowe

Cartoonists are, by necessity, students of body language. So are politicians. I was wondering what all the brouhaha was about “Waterbottlegate” until I got a good slow-motion look at Marco Rubio reaching for the Poland Spring.

We Floridians have been watching this guy’s rise since he was in the Legislature, and he’s a natural pol. During his tour-de-force bilingual rebuttal, he was yakking away about some dry subject that would put anyone to sleep (and by this time, most of us were), and impulsively performed a simple act that would normally go unremarked.

Remember Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” lip-bite? Rubio’s water shtick was like that. He paused for drama, then reached off screen for the bottle and brought it back. During the entire operation, his smoldering Latin eyes hardly ever broke their lock on the camera. You could practically hear the Republicans in the room gasping with joy and admiration. Not only was the rising golden boy connecting with the Hispanic types, but Rubio was seducing the other cohort with whom the GOP scores so poorly—the womenfolk.

Except that he wasn’t. Frankly, the whole thing looked weird. Rubio was way too aware of the camera and his place in it, and it was clear he’d listened too much to his handlers. “Remember what happened to Michele Bachmann during her rebuttal?” they probably said to him. “Never take your eye off the ball.”

This is where experience will pay off for our boy wonder, who will learn over time how to look more comfortable under the klieg lights. The best politicians, like Clinton, can fake sincerity so well that even they believe what they’re saying (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman…etc.”).

The good news for Rubio is that time heals everything in politics, thanks to the electorate’s criminally short memory. Remember Clinton’s own intro to the American people, when he received a standing ovation for the phrase, “and in conclusion”?